Thursday’s Threat Assessment

It’s news time.
FCC Chairman, Michael Powell, joins us today on The Screen Savers. The Concorde SST was first shown on this day in 1967. A Federal judge ordered Microsoft not to bundle IE4 in Windows in 1997.

SCO’s site is down again, the victim of a massive DDoS attack. The corporate email, intranet, and customer support operations were also brought down. Several thousand computers were used in the SYN flood.

Can you lose money in the Wi-Fi biz? Apparently Intel can. The company is taking an “embarassing” $600 million charge on its wireless chips. It announced yesterday that it’s reorganizing the division. The chief reason for the write-down: sluggish sales on Intel’s wireless chipset.

Microsoft’s gift to you this holiday season: no December Windows Update. Is it because there are no security flaws to fix? No. A new flaw in Internet Explorer makes it easy to spoof web sites. So the next time you’re redirected to a phony EBay site, let’s say, to extract your credit card number, the fake site can stuff Ebay’s URL in the address bar making it indistinguishable from the real deal. Microsoft is looking into the report, saying that security firm Secunia should have notified them before publicizing the bug.

A flaw in Yahoo! Mail that allowed malicious code to launch automatically when messages were opened has been fixed. A similar bug in Hotmail was corrected last week. In both cases, security firm Finjan discovered the flaw.

It’s the end of line for the Jenni cam. Jenni Ringley, the woman who paved the way for, well, you know, has decided to shut down her site at the end of the year. Apparently PayPal is closing her account due to “frontal nudity” and if you can’t make a buck, what’s the point? Fortunately, you can still get your frontal nudity at Chris Pirillo’s Rent My Chest.

Researchers have used the Hot or Not web site to prove that pretty women scramble men’s brains. Or at least their ability to plan for the future. Women, however, were unaffected by good looking men.

re: Online shoppers spent a record $8.5 billion last month.
I wonder if there is a directly related decrease in sales at local retail stores?
We just had a pretty serious snow storm this past weekend out East and the stores just got killed. So I’m imagining that a lot of people did some of their shopping online as a result.
Also, a friend and I were wondering how many people will order online at BestBuy.com, for example even though there’s a Best Buy right down the street from their house just to save paying the sales tax (8.75% in New York i think it is now.) Are there zones set up so that outlet stores gets a percentage of the online sales in his area. Then again, BestBuy is a corporate owned store so who really gives a crap since all the profits are going into a larger corporate account.

> SCO’s site is down again, the victim of a massive DDoS attack.
> The corporate email, intranet, {snip}
How the heck did a DDoS attack effect their intranet? You can build a really good firewall using Linux or Free/Net/Open BSD for cheap. 😉
What’s an alleged high-tech company doing leaving all their internal servers exposed to the internet!
Perhaps the media is just lumping many different cracks under the buzz acronym of DDoS?
… But a DDoS attack taking out their internal servers — how serendipitous. Now when their 30 days is up, they can complain to the judge “We got hacked, and we need more time to recover all our information.” (and in the mean time, our scam will continue…)

Hey Leo, love the show (now that I have cable again, only took a year, I can watch it). Love your book, bought it at a Barnes and Noble. I guess, besides telling you how great I think you are, I really just wanted to say that Yahoo is in general a security flaw. Anything that they put out other than the html pages is buggy and flawed.
P.S. Have fun at the party tonight! Drink one for me.

Anyone in their mid-20s or younger does not remember an internet not utterly dominated by today’s giant digital platforms. After all, the idea of having a full, unencumbered internet experience without ever needing a Google or Facebook account is pretty much inconceivable now. All ecommerce roads eventually lead back to Amazon. All your online activity […]

A former Nasa engineer spent six months building a glitter bomb trap to trick thieves after some parcels were stolen from his doorstep. The device, hidden in an Apple Homepod box, used four smartphones, a circuit board and 1lb (453g) of glitter.

In a blog post Monday, Google said it would lease a large office building at 550 Washington St. in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood and make it the centerpiece of its new 1.7 million-square-foot Hudson Square Campus. Google plans to invest $1 billion in capital improvements to the campus, which will also include two nearby buildings […]

France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.

Charter Communications, the parent company of Spectrum, has agreed to a $174.2 million settlement with Attorney General Barbara Underwood, following the 2017 lawsuit that saw the AG’s office sue the internet provider over misleading internet speeds. The lawsuit, led by then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleged that speeds were up to 80 percent slower than advertised.